


Earthquake

by orphan_account



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, Shadowhunters, The Bane Chronicles - Sarah Rees Brennan & Cassandra Clare & Maureen Johnson
Genre: Disaster, Magnus and Ragnor Meet, Young Magnus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 15:18:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5132405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Ragnor met Magnus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Earthquake

**Author's Note:**

> I was just going to write a quick little headcannon post about how Ragnor and Magnus met based off of some little tidbits in The Bane Chronicles, but it got away for me so here’s a little oneshot about it.

Really, there were a lot of ways Ragnor Fell would’ve preferred to have been woken up. Kissed by a lovely maiden. A knock at the door with an offer of breakfast. Warm sunlight filtering through the window of the inn. All of these would have been acceptable. A monster of an earthquake in the middle of the night was not acceptable.

Even less acceptable was that it had tossed him out of his incredibly comfortable bed and onto the hard, cold, wooden floor with a resounding smack. He groaned and attempted to get to his feet as the floor continued to pitch and the screams of the inn’s other patrons sounded through the walls. They were shouting franticly in a language he wasn’t all that familiar with but he was pretty sure that under the circumstances they all involved variations of “get out of the building” and “we’re all about to die.”

With some effort he stumbled out into the hall and down the stairs that had previously been straight but now contained a bit of a curve. Only when he’d made it to the street did it occur to him that something was wrong with all this. The earth was still pitching and rolling, but no earthquake lasted this long. Not a natural one, anyways.

Demons were the first thought that crossed his mind and he didn’t bother to let anything else cross it before he made to leave. He’d only come to this country as a favor to a friend, and that favor did not involve demons. The town’s people could handle it on their own or, perhaps, they’d get “lucky” and some Shadowhunter would be passing through and they would handle it. Not likely though, given this was a middle of nowhere town that didn’t seem to matter to people like Shadowhunters.

Before Ragnor could make it more than a few shaky steps down the road the friend he’d been there to help came running up, a wild look in his gold-ringed eyes.

“Ragnor! It’s a warlock!” He panted, arms held out a bit to keep his balance.

“What the hell do you mean ‘it’s a warlock’?” Ragnor shouted back, striking much the same pose.

“I-I don’t know. He doesn’t have a mark I can see but I couldn’t get close. He’s gotta be one though. He’s just standing in the middle of the square and the world is falling apart around him, and there’s magic everywhere.”

“Well what the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Ragnor growled as the earth gave a particularly violent pitch that sent him stumbling. “I’m not about to go on my own to fight someone this powerful, Jeremiah!”

“I don’t think you’ll have to fight him, Ragnor. He’s just a bloody kid. Can’t be more than seventeen.”

This brought Ragnor up short for a moment. A kid was responsible for this?

“Just because he looks like a kid doesn’t mean he is.” Ragnor said after a moment.

“Dammit, Ragnor, I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose! He looked scared. He looked like he wanted to stop it but couldn’t. If something isn’t done he’ll destroy the town and probably himself. He’ll kill everyone here.”

Ragnor gritted his teeth, trying to come up with any logical argument as to why he shouldn’t be the one to have to handle this. He was hardly the most powerful warlock out there, for one thing. For another, he disliked kids. Well. He disliked most people in general.

But…if he didn’t handle it the kid could do even more damage. Already they were risking the wrath of the Shadowhunters on every downworlder within fifty miles if they found out a warlock was responsible for something like this.

“Fine. Dammit. Fine.” Ragnor snapped, spinning around and running towards the square as fast as he could despite the chaos. It was if they were on a ship at sea in a storm with all the cargo let loose. The ground continued to pitch and roll and crack, tossing debris up and down again and again. People would gain their footing for a moment only to lose it again as they got slammed by debris or one another.

After a considerable amount of time—and three separate falls that had scraped his palms raw—Ragnor finally made it to the square which looked exactly as Jeremiah had said it would. The ground was shattered into huge chunks that knocked and crashed against one another like ice on the ocean, blue magic dancing and sparking between them, and at the center of it all was a scrawny teenage boy. His skin was a deep tan and his messy black hair was being tossed around by the force of magic. Ragnor couldn’t spot a warlock’s mark either, but it didn’t mean much. It could easily be hidden under the boy’s shabby clothes. Scales, patterning, a tail. He’d seen a lot of variations of marks in his life.

Jeremiah had also been right that the boy looked scared and out of control. There were tears streaming down his face and he was screaming in what Ragnor thought was some dialect of Indonesian, but it was hard to tell for sure over all the noise. It sound a lot like a litany of “I’m sorry” and “help me” though.

Taking a deep breath and cursing everything that had brought him to this place and to this moment of having to handle a situation he was not at all qualified to handle, Ragnor stepped out onto a relatively stable looking piece of ground. Relatively stable mostly meaning that it was large and hadn’t flipped over in the two minutes he’d been watching the kid and deciding what to do.

“Hey!” Ragnor shouted in Indonesian, hoping he’d gotten the word right and deciding he’d gotten close enough when the kid turned towards him, still looking terrified.

As the boy watched Ragnor pulled off his glamour that had made him look like a regular human man. The boy looked startled, but even though Ragnor had drawn his attention his magic hadn’t lessened.

“I’m like you, alright?” Ragnor shouted in stilted Indonesian. “I need you to listen to me alright? I’m going to help you but you have to listen.”

The kid gulped and nodded.

“Okay. Close your eyes, and take a deep breath. Feel your feet on the ground. Focus on the ground, and your breathing. You will be alright.” Ragnor kept repeating the same advice, and the magic began to dim just a little. “Good. Good. Now focus on your hands. Focus just on the magic touching your hands, and pull it back to you. Little by little.”

After another few minutes of gentle coaxing the magic vanished and everything went eerily still. The townsfolk could still be heard screaming and crying, but the noises seemed distant. The boy had collapsed where he stood, spilled out on the ground and not moving. For a moment Ragnor was tempted to leave him there, but was again stopped by the idea of the Shadowhunters finding him and holding all the local downworlders responsible.

Carefully he picked his way over the fractured ground to the boy and placed two fingers against his throat, finding only a weak pulse. With a glance around the square Ragnor pulled his glamour back on and bent to lift the boy, a little astonished at how light he was. The kid didn’t seem like he’d ever had a proper meal.

For a moment Ragnor just stood there, the unconscious boy in his arms, as he tried to figure out what to do. Eventually he settled on bringing him to Jeremiah’s home. It was quite far outside of town so it had probably survived the disaster intact. Jeremiah had gotten him into this, so he was going to provide shelter without protest if he ever wanted Ragnor’s help again.

———————————————–

“I don’t like having him in my home, Ragnor.” Jeremiah said from the bedroom doorway he was hovering in as Ragnor deposited the boy on the bed. “If the Shadowhunters find out I’m harboring him….”

“For one, if they found out a warlock caused this they wouldn’t care if you were harboring him or not. They’d come after you anyways just for being a downworlder and in the vicinity. For another, you’re right that he has no visible mark and that is extremely lucky for everyone involved. He just looks like another victim of a freak occurrence that mundane science can’t explain.” Ragnor said, bending to look a bit closer at the boy.

As Ragnor moved a hand to brush the boy’s hair aside his eyes snapped open and he shot up in the bed, his back slamming into the headboard and blue sparks dancing around his hands.

“Easy, easy.” Ragnor said, taking a quick step back and holding up his hands as he carefully stripped off his glamour once more. “It’s me. The one who helped you stop.”

The boy eyed him carefully, taking a few deep breaths as the sparks around his hands abated. Ragnor finally realized what mark the boy carried: golden eyes with slit pupils like a cat.

“Where am I?” He asked in Indonesian after a moment.

“A house in the countryside. You’re safe here.” Ragnor told him, carefully lowering his hands. “My name is Ragnor Fell. This is Jeremiah Harris.”

The boy was silent for a moment, watching both of them. Ragnor waved his hand gently and a glass of water and some bread appeared on a tray next to him. He grabbed at the food without looking at it, still watching them.

“How old are you?” Ragnor asked. He had to be older than he looked. No child would be able to produce power like that, let alone for so long.

“Seventeen.” He mumbled through a mouthful of food.

“When were you born?” Ragnor tried.

The boy stared at him like Ragnor was the dumbest thing he’d ever seen and deadpanned, “Seventeen years ago. That is how age works, is it not?”

“But…you can’t be seventeen and that powerful!” Jeremiah blurted out. Ragnor shut the door in his face and narrowed his eyes at the boy.

“He is right.” Ragnor said after a moment.

The boy shrugged and gulped down the last of the water, “The Silent Brothers thought it was strange as well. They said I must be the son of a very powerful demon.”

Ragnor froze, “…the Silent Brothers told you?”

I lived with them for a few years after a Shadowhunter discovered me at the church I was living in after—” the boy cut himself off abruptly, as if he’d about to let something slip that he didn’t want to.

“And when did you leave the Silent City?”

“Last year. Why?”

Ragnor contemplated for a moment, picking his words carefully. “The Shadowhunters are…a complicated people. Their mission is good, but they…really aren’t. They can be very dangerous to people like us. You should be careful around them.”

The boy shrugged, settling back into the bed now that he’d finished the food and water.

“Do you have a name? Something I can call you other than Boy?” Ragnor asked.

He was silent for several moments before answering; “Bane.”

“Bane?”

“It’s English. It means something that causes ruin.”

Ragnor couldn’t help startling a bit at this answer, realizing what it must mean; “Tonight isn’t the first time you’ve lost control, is it?”

His silence was answer enough.

“You know…” Ragnor said after awhile, coming to sit carefully on the edge of the bed farthest from Bane, “Destruction and ruin aren’t always as bad as they may seem. Some of the most magnificent plants grow from volcanic soil, and some of the most beautiful structures in the world are ones that have fallen to ruin for hundreds of years. I’m not saying you should go around destroying things on purpose but…destruction doesn’t have to be the end. You can learn to control it and turn it into something good. Something magnificent.”

Bane stared at him, looking a little desperate. “I don’t know how.”

Ragnor wasn’t sure what possessed him to make the offer, but he knew he had to make it; “I’ll help you then, Magnus Bane.”

A brilliant smile lit up his face; “Magnus Bane…. I like that.”


End file.
